Turn Blue

Working once again with Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, the Black Keys try for a moodier, more atmospheric record. Turn Blue sounds distant and subdued, a murky-sounding collection of '70s stoner-rock facsimiles and swirling gray tones.

This may be a weird statement to make about one of North America's most popular rock bands, but the Black Keys are survivors. The majority of the duo's colleagues from the early 2000s have since called it quits, but the workmanlike Akron boys Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney kept their heads down, dutifully churning out gutshot blues-pop mimicry that carried just enough of a punch to establish them as, at the least, a reliable stadium-act opening band.

Then: worldwide financial turmoil struck, the buying public went from purchasing few records to no records at all, dance music infiltrated pop's consciousness, and guitars were, prophetically, exchanged for turntables (or, in keeping with recent trends, MPCs). Banjo-players and Dave Grohl formed an unlikely alliance to establish "real music" as 2010s mainstream rock culture's slyly conservative ethos and just like that, the Black Keys emerged as the most popular guys making music that sounds like older music without getting all P.T. Barnum about it.

Brothers from 2010 (the first record made at Muscle Shoals in three decades, natch) was the Keys' most consciously bloated effort and, paradoxically, the one that placed them firmly in their current position of The Only Band Your Friend From High School Listens to These Days; writing their catchiest song to date, "Tighten Up", helped, as did soundtracking every goddamn car commercial and buddy-comedy movie trailer that didn't have breakdancing hamsters in it. Cementing their rep as canny opportunists, Carney and Auerbach returned a year later with El Camino, a sleazy, hook-laden album that switched between the basic thematic food groups of cars-and-women and cars-as-women with the horndog exuberance of a kid doing donuts on an ATV in an abandoned dirt lot.

El Camino was the best ZZ Top album that you can't stream on Spotify and, in an impressive feat for a band so 9-to-5 about their creative process that they once recorded an album in an actual factory, it also turned out to be their most distinctive work and arguably their best. The Black Keys' eighth album and first in three years isn't their worst effort—that distinction still belongs to 2006's Magic Potion, their paste-bland major-label debut—but after the relatively fresh approach on El Camino, it's dismaying how much of the inert, mid-tempo Turn Blue resembles elements of their previous albums: Brothers' stoner-friendly drift, Attack & Release's toy-xylophone psychedelia, Magic Potion's indifferent blare. After a decade-plus of pilfering musical history with all the subtlety of a brick through a windshield—for Christ's sake, last time around they basically plagiarized "Last Dance With Mary Jane"—the Black Keys' cultural cannibalism has finally turned inward.

Turn Blue finds the Black Keys getting deep with themselves in several ways; Auerbach recently told Rolling Stone that the band set out to make a singles-bereft "Headphone[s] record," and he's alluded elsewhere that his messy, allegation-laden divorce proceedings—which, in a this-joke-writes-itself touch, once was believed to include a lock of Bob Dylan's hair—lent the album a "melancholy" vibe. Appropriately, Turn Blue sounds distant and subdued, a murky-sounding collection of '70s stoner-rock facsimiles and swirling gray tones that, for the most part, are indistinguishable.

Lyrically, the Black Keys' casual chauvinism has gone from "Girl, you look so good" to "Woman, you done me wrong," the shift in mindset undeniably affected by Auerbach's personal troubles. "Why you always wanna love the ones who hurt you," he sings over the sluggish bounce of "Year in Review", "Then break down when they go and deserve you." Allusions to rain, running, sickness, and the open road are predictably expressed, and Auerbach admits on the title track's disco-ball lilt: "In the dead of the night/ I start to lose control." The couplet speaks volumes, as the mushy gruel of Turn Blue represents the sound of a band going so deep into their own heads that they lose track of where the exit doors are located.

It's tempting once again to blame the dullness on Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, a sometimes-capable producer whose reputation in recent years has carried the weight of an "Out of Order" sign on a bathroom door. Indeed, Burton's reign of boredom continues here in typical fashion; his love for airlock-hatch atmospherics and stiff string-section motifs are intact, and even without the credits confirming it, you could probably guess that the orchestral touches of "Year in Review" were lifted from the score for an Italian 1970s sex comedy.

If Burton remains an easy scapegoat, this time it's harder to make the charges stick. Turn Blue is the second consecutive Black Keys album where he's credited as a contributing songwriter, and as the veritable third Black Key since Attack & Release, his presence has led to some of the band's most successful, purposefully forceful music. The Black Keys are, in fact, the one band this decade that Burton has collaborated with effectively, so the failures of Turn Blue come across mostly as a byproduct of an imbalance of power. While the suffocating weightlessness of the LP's first third is enough to give anyone who's listened to a Broken Bells record more than once a serious case of PTSD, Carney and Auerbach sound as if they're holding back in response, succumbing to bland choruses and muddy aimlessness despite the fact that their catalog dictates they're capable of much more than this. Throughout Turn Blue, it's difficult to tell how invested these guys actually are in the music they're making, an indifferent attitude that encourages the listener to act in tandem.

The Black Keys have never been known for innovation—we're talking about a band that covered the fucking Beatles on their first album—but Turn Blue's strongest moments happen when they explore new territory. At nearly seven minutes, opener "Weight of Love" is a moody epic that carries melodic hints of the pleasantly stretched-out "Bullet in the Brain", meandering to a searing guitar solo that, for those with heavy investment in searing guitar solos, should more than suffice. Lead single "Fever", meanwhile, is Turn Blue's Festival-Headliner Hit, its subtly catchy hook and farty keyboard sounds resembling what might happen if MGMT-circa-2014 tried to write something approaching "Electric Feel" in terms of weirded-out pop accessibility.

Turn Blue's most surprising moment arrives at the end: "Gotta Get Away", whose title alone suggests that the Black Keys are ready to move on from this uncharacteristically dour fog they're trapped in. Coming off as the strongest classic-rock beer-commercial jam since Kid Rock's cliché-tastic "All Summer Long", the cowboy-boots guitar riff and Auerbach's unchained vocal take pair perfectly to create the album's most energizing blast-in-a-glass cut, to the point where it's hard not to dream of an entire album of songs like this. The song sounds like summer; with the right sync, "Gotta Get Away" could make millionaires out of anyone who sells rubber tires and rope.

"For no one/ It's no fun, no fun/ With a one track mind," Auerbach sings on the tune, after name-checking Kalamazoo and wondering where all the "good women" have gone in typical dirtbag fashion; it's hard not to read his lyrical admission as anything but self-prescriptive. On a record where the Black Keys' try way too hard to be "weird," "Gotta Get Away" is the sole moment where they get out of their own heads and back into that beat-up van. You can't fault them for trying to get deep, but this is one band for which shallowness is a virtue.